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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

I'm sort of more interested in the effect this has mentally on people. Not from a FOMO point of view but from a "what is my place in the world" point of view.

If you're an artist or a musician or a developer or, well anything really, what does it mean to be able to go online and are hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are?

I'm 50 and sufficiently old / mature to be able to cope with this but even so, when I do a search for "linocut" (one of my hobbies) and see 82,000 results (just on Etsy) - and they're all really good and incredibly cheap... this dents something in me.

As I say, I'm realistic enough to know I'm not the world's best artist and I'm not trying to make a living out of it - it's also great, and useful, to see other people's work...but it's also somehow galling as well, in a way that's quite hard to define.

It's a bit like Douglas Adams' infinity - it isn't infinity but it feels sufficiently big to make one teeter a bit and wonder at one's place in the universe...

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I have the same feeling as a traveler. There's always a Greater Badass who has been on the same adventures as you, but roughed it out the entire way. There's an 80 year old guy who did it in half the time, and another that did it on one foot. It's hard to look back at an identity-defining motorcycle trip, and realise that it's not that special.

In a way though, it's liberating. One-upping the entire world is so out of reach that you can focus on your own experience. Just go there and have your fun.

If my place in the universe is to be a mediocre artist and a passable rider, so be it.

I agree with your conclusion here. And a big thing to keep in mind is that you are that guy to a lot of the people you’ll meet. As an expat living in exotic places, I find that I consistently impress people with my story and meet people with more impressive stories than me, often on the same day.

Sage advice.

In comparing ourselves to others -- wealth, beauty, fitness, career, etc -- we tend to look up (and feel unsuccessful) rather than look down (and feel successful).

>There's an 80 year old guy who did it in half the time

Isn't that worse when it comes to travelling? I'd rather experience 7 things in 7 days than 7 things in 2 days.

Some people are speed-runners, and some people are completionists, but most people are just "filthy casuals," and we're fine with that. :)

It's all about the bragging rights, everything, every moment you feel is worth remembering: so you can tell others. But that is not a bad thing, we're social animals. We just need to drop the competitive aspect and share joy in others achievements, rather than use them as a mirror for self depreciation.

> In a way though, it's liberating. One-upping the entire world is so out of reach that you can focus on your own experience. Just go there and have your fun.

I haven't gotten my head around that one. If I'm nothing but some random nobody and nothing I do really matters, why should I care about my own experience enough to focus on it? What's the fun in randomly killing time? If that's all it's about, I might as well just zone out and watch netflix, or whatever the easiest way to kill time happens to be.

https://media.tenor.com/R4bqdpchzfoAAAAd/buzz-lightyear-fact...

The blessing and the curse is that you get to choose.

Choose Netflix, choose a hobby, choose a career, choose a family, pick several of the above, and/or choose to try to surmount the mountain and be the best among billions.

There's no meaning of life, but there's the meaning you choose for your life.

As with best practices in goals and games, I suggest placing meaning in the choices where success is defined by what is within your control, not on what is outside of your control.

But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got the internet?

Life has no meaning. We are all as insignificant as grains of sand on a beach. Uniqueness is a big lie that everyone wants to believe. If you enjoy watching netflix more than doing slightly-less-common experiences, you should probably do so. The point of not just passively consuming content is creating memories that can be enjoyed later as well, particularly when discussing with other people.

The differentiation is that you're the only one having that subjective experience and you're stuck with it, so as far as you're concerned the rest of the world is a construct around you and you might as well make it an experience with which you're at least content.

If we started to have neural linking that mimics exactly the entirety of another person's subjective experience, perhaps we'd prefer being brains in vats experiencing a handful of human TV channels while the "top" whatever live it themselves. But then again at that point why not experience an eagle's flight, a whale's dive, the sense of scale of an ant, the computing of some supercomputer, etc.. and whatever we currently consider to be topping our experiences would also be relative.

In a perfect world, you would find the thing you love most, and do that. If it's watching Netflix, so be it.

I assume if you had perfect freedom (and an unconditional basic income), you wouldn't be watching Netflix, at least not all the time. Passive fun is what people usually do when they are tired. You wouldn't be tired all the time.

The difficult part is having to work to pay your bills, in a world so large that there is nothing unique about your skills. That makes you tired, and then there is just enough energy left for watching Netflix.

There was a time when I have said to myself on multiple occasions that "Honestly, I can do 'this' all my life". This being browsing reddit or HN or watching vines and so on. But life has shaken that belief multiple times. Basically you have seen all the patterns there are to be found in the new content that engages you and you can imagine futher combinations of them in your mind (so they don't tickle you or interest you that much) and you say to yourself, "I am done with consuming internet".

There are a lot of software developers out there better than me, faster than me, more knowledgable than me. I'll never be in the top 10% of software devs.

Sometimes when I look at the posts here, and follow software dev sites and blogs, and about things going on in e.g. the Linux kernel, or compiler development, I wonder if I'll ever be in the top 90% of software devs.⁰

Then I realise it doesn't matter that there are thousands of devs out there better than me. They might be able to do any project I might want to get involved in better than I can - but they can't do all the projects that interest me. No matter how good the top 1% of software devs are, they can't do all the software dev work that desperately needs doing, let alone all the software dev work that is merely "important". There's just too much that could be done.

So I can get on with my own projects in peace. It doesn't matter that other people could do my projects better than me, because they're busy on their own projects instead. I can still work on my stuff, and that's fine.

⁰ I always forget about the existence of thousands of devs who struggle with fizzbuzz, because my brain is mean to me.

Why do you need to justify your place in the world in the first place? You aren't responsible for the world. You came to life because of some whim and happenstance from your parents. The things you experience might have been done before, but it's you who is experiencing them right now. All of the greats before you would have traded their entire legacy to have a few more conscious moments. Sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench has happened millions of times yet it's still going to be extraordinary each and every time, to paraphrase Einstein.

These emotions are normal when faced with the internet, but some perspective is important. Or rather, it helps to focus on the basic facts of life and its finiteness.

> If you're an artist or a musician or a developer or, well anything really, what does it mean to be able to go online and are hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are?

"hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are" existed much before internet.

But when the world gets too big I take a walk downtown, and ask myself how many of these people I am looking at are famous, content-producing top talent developers.

Probably I am the only embedded C developer walking on this street right now. Maybe the only one in town?

How many of these people care about Vim vs Emacs, Rust vs C, etc? How many care about that guy that cheated on the wife?

How many towns like this, with none or a few software developers, there are in the world?

The answers to all those questions confort me.

> "hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are" existed much before internet.

Yes... but the population has exploded so exponentially that 8% of all people who have ever lived in history are alive today[1], so people back then also had less people to compete with to stand out during their time.

They also had less and less previous generations of people's achievements accumulated to study and be aware of to build off of as well. Also they had much more low-hanging fruit they could tackle. It's much harder to find something novel or likely to lead to a scientific breakthrough to pursue, creative or scientific, nowadays.

And also didn't have an internet full of constant distractions, so they were likely more productive in their respective field(s).

https://www.techopian.com/eight-per-cent-of-people-who-have-...

I'm not so sure. Isn't this like justifying why we "fail"?

"Back then there was less people to compete with. Accumulated knowledge was less than today. There were more easier topics to explore. On top of that, I am constantly distracted. It's OK if I don't breakthrough in anything today".

10000 years in the future there may be someone saying the exact same thing as they travel through a lab-generated wormhole to their home in another galaxy.

There was a great article once upon a time, about picking the arena you fight in essentially. You have to recognize which arena you're participating in both literally and mentally, and decide whether or not that's where you want to be.

If your arena is the internet, then it's essentially the whole world. But if you focus more on smaller scale communities and the people around you, it's much easier to find a way to contribute that makes you proud and accomplished. The fact that the best guitar player in the world is accessible on the internet is neat, but they are probably not available to play a gig in your town. It's great that there are better software developers out there, but only a few of them are working on a project you're part of, etc.

Many of the people selling linocuts (or whatever) will have been to art school or at least had some significant training. And they will have spent years doing nothing but art.

A hobbyist, especially one who isn't trying to make a career out of it, isn't going to be able to compete with that.

Which is fair enough. Why would you, as a hobbyist, expect to compete with full-time professionals?

But it's also true creative markets are a bell curve. The big money is in the mediocre middle. It's why a novel series like Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey sells in dumper truck quantities, while something more adventurous and original probably won't even be picked up.

Most people are mediocre at what they do (by definition) but it's still possible to be financially successful, especially in a middle class career.

If you want mass praise and attention, that's a different problem.

>But it's also true creative markets are a bell curve.

There is no middle in the creative markets, the top dozen people take everything and no one else can make a living.

I think they meant that the type of content/art is a bell curve distribution. Most popular stuff is what most people like by definition. Hence, the "average" taste is what sells the most (produced by the top dozen people).

An extremely niche art/book/movie will never make big money, even if the work is from an artistic genius.

I'm going to link this fragment of a documentary on the Belgian artist Sam Dillemans called "Madness in the detail". He talks about his work and his struggle to get to that elusive point where he finally reaches his artistic vision, as well as his impressions on how the rest of the world approaches art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsZ5pmZfIc0

Clearly, everything else is subservient to art as far as Sam Dillemans is concerned. That's who he is. That's the mind space in which he operates. It's his innate personality.

Do you have to be like Sam Dillemans? Do you want to be like Sam Dillemans? Sure, there are aspects of him that everyone recognizes within themselves. It's up to you, though, to figure out what you want to take from that and how far you want to take that for yourself. Everyone is living their own unique, personal experience of life. There's only one Sam Dillemans living the life of Sam Dillemans. Trying to become Sam Dillemans is futile.

Trying to become yourself, well, that's what it's all about, isn't it?

> Trying to become yourself, well, that's what it's all about, isn't it?

It truly is. I felt inadequate as a musician until I found “my voice”. Now it seems incoherent to compare myself to another artist. I’ve also found myself a lot more accepting of other art because it doesn’t seem to be a competition any longer.

> Trying to become yourself

That sums up the thread for me. It's a noble goal, thank you for the reminder. Being an artist, a human being, is not about competing with others as to who is better, it's about becoming truly and deeply yourself.

Recently I wrote down the following, from an eulogy by Conan O'Brien about an advice he got from a respected elder.

"Be yourself. That's the only way it can work." - Johnny Carson

I've always liked:

"Be yourself, everybody else is taken."

Great share thank you. Passion and frustration, living in the shadow of giants vs standing on their shoulders.

You want to be uniquely good and I think it's because we all want to feel "safe" in our tribe - as if our unique skill makes us specially valuable.

Now our Tribe seems to be enormously large and it's far harder to feel special - there is fierce competition. But in reality we are all part of a system that is not a tribe but we're still trying to think of it as if it was and one can be "safe" in it and happy without having to feel too unique.

You can be locally famous for things still. Live music is still better than recordings and a painting by someone you know is still better than one you bought off the internet.

I suggest ignoring the vastness of talent out there because it's not the right way to draw a feeling of safety and self worth. You only have to be the best dad in the world to your own kids - the other kids in the world have their own best dad.

I have similar thoughts in regards to the creative outputs of our various cultures and how we'll deal with that - as creatives, as fans, as critics, etc.

When I was young, it seemed impossible to me to think that someone could know ALL of recorded music, or ALL of cinema, because there was so much of it. But there really isn't _that_ much. Not as of the 1990s. And there are music and film buffs who have encyclopedic knowledge of these things, who impress me to this day - if at least for the dedication of time, mindspace, and memory.

But we're at a stage where the output could potentially surpass a single human's ability to input. Where it might be impossible for a person, not only to hear all the music in a single genre, but in a single decade. It's possible that there would be so much music made in a single genre, in a single decade, that a person could not know all of it.

That's amazing to me. It's something we haven't experienced collectively - an unfathomable mass of creative output. The potential to hear a new song every 5 minutes of every day of the rest of your life.

What does music critique look like in that world? What does fandom look like? How do the pretentious maintain their imagined status if their pedestals are too short?

I love the idea that a musician could make a living from the proceeds of thousands or hundreds of thousands of fans, whom most in the world would have never heard of. It's a scale our current culture can't comprehend.

I marvel at the potential and consider it as beautiful, scary, and liberating as seeing thousands of galaxies in a pinhead-sized portion of the night sky.

It doesn't matter, as long as you have a few people around you who need your skills.

There are few billion vids on how to boil an egg and the mindless algos will rank them just cuz thats their job. That doesn't mean it has any great value cause how many people really need the skills of the best egg boiler in the world?

As corporate wonderland and the mega machine that it represents, grow more and more efficient, out of control and mindless, it targets and uses the best of the best for whatever shit its stuck in loop trying to optimize.

They are treated like machine parts and discarded and replaced, the moment they think, say or do anything the machine doesn't need.

Who needs that? Only the clueless.

What do you mean by "better"? I know some people are technically better than me at making music but technically impressive doesn't always mean good (by good I mean something I would like because it's all subjective). Music I make is some of my favorite music because I'm the only person who knows my taste best so it makes sense, I can make exactly what I want to hear. And I don't like sharing it with random people I mostly just show it to my friends. But the main reason I make it is because the process feels so good and when I'm done I have a new favorite song to listen to.

I’m going to prod a little bit: share it with your neighbors as well! If there is a block party or something see if you can perform or play some recordings. Who knows, maybe there’s someone within walking distance that wants to jam! You neighbors will appreciate living in such a creative community!

This was the sentiment I was scrolling down hoping to find reflected in the discussion. I agree with you, but I was going to frame it a little differently: only you bring your own unique talent and lived experience to what you do. That makes the way you practice your music, visual art, craft (including programming), and its output, valuable. Even if—for the moment—you are the only person enjoying it.

> What do you mean by "better"?

I believe the OP is referring to e.g. Salieri vs. Mozart.

What worries me about this is the impact it has on teenagers.

My hunch is that this is behind a great deal of the mental health problems we're starting to see them have.

Growing gusto depends, in part, on naïveté since it's so easy to be deflated when you're just starting to explore something.

Hah. Yes. I still remember thinking I was being sophisticated music critic when I talked about "Evanescence" as an example of conversation that is not completely unlike an opera. I also remember the stares I got from older students. I still chuckle at the memory sometimes. To be young again.

I think I kinda disagree about the impact on younger people though. If anything, they are more likely to develop appropriate filters than we are.

> If anything, they are more likely to develop appropriate filters than we are.

I thought so too, but the data seems to suggest that they're not.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02206-9

Fascinating stuff. Thank you for sharing this. Since this one is focused on US, is there a similar study done not for US ( I am curious if some US-specific aspects could play a role here ). I am particularly concerned about girls depression rate jump.

Totally but in the end it’s not about being better but about having more fun (and not necessarily quantitative). The moment you say I’ve seen enough how tos and turn off the computer/phone and say I’m gonna have a blast winging this, let the fun start! But I hear you though, Im often neighboring with a little existential crisis. But again I remind myself why I am doing this ‘hobby’ and how I’m free to take any direction and am not constrained to become the best because it’s really not a competition. But the noise is certainly dizzying if not deafening

> It's a bit like Douglas Adams' infinity

or his Total Perspective Vortex: "when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here.”"

The solution to belonging is to live in the moment. I don’t care what other people think of my travels, it’s about me and my experiences.

The moment I start doing something for others is the moment I stop being true to myself.

I’m genuinely happy other people do things better than I do.

For most things, especially art, I would think that the expanded access to like-minded people would more than make up for the expanded visibility of people more skilled than you. Before the internet, would your place in the world have been defined around you being the most skilled linocut artist in your small town? That doesn’t seem likely. Surely now you have access to a relatively vast community of people interested in linocut art, nearly all of which are not among the few most skilled artists in the form.

The time to yank out the Desiderata:

"If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."

No different than when a child enters high school and finds that the Varsity baseball team (or soccer team or whatever) is on a league above-and-beyond their abilities. You either get better to join the level of the competition, or you drop out.

It happens again in the highschool -> college transition.

Learning your place in the world is part of growing up. Any kid growing up thinking they're hot stuff because of their performance in grade school gets a rude wakeup call in high school and/or college.

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As a Kid, I thought I was pretty good at chess. Turns out my adult skill in chess is roughly class D and I peaked at 1500 Elo (and as an adult, I'm way better at chess than I used to be).

As a kid, I also thought I was good at Starcraft: Brood War. I even played the Blizzard ladder pretty decently. But when I sought the competitive community, I barely made rank D- on Teamliquid.

I always was reasonably humble about my abilities with regards to sports, but I have plenty of friends who got a rude awakening that their skills weren't varsity level. I fortunately was in less ego-driven sports, such as Track and Field, where the teams are always accepting of you regardless of your abilities. A runner who can do 5-minute miles would rather run with a teammate for good discussion / less boredom, even if those teammates are 1 to 2-minutes slower. And we all can have fun with discus or shot-put even if I'm much weaker than everyone else.

Meanwhile, a lot of grade-school baseball pitchers or point-guards couldn't make the high school team. Going from "best in grade school" to "not even on the team" in high school really was quite a shock for them...

Its better to learn your place in the world sooner, rather than later. Getting blasted with the right amount of humility is more important for proper psychological development than thinking you're the best at the world at (insert sport / activity / skill here) and just being completely delusional until adulthood.

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As we grow up and specialize into various subjects, the opposite happens. Lets say... GPU programming. I've probably spent more time searching for the community (be it online, or in person) to find people who can even discuss the subject with me because its so specialized.

Its because the number of GPU-programmers is much smaller than say, the number of people who try to get good at running a mile, play baseball, or play chess. (And most people who do get into the subject just use Python Tensorflow, rather than discussing the lower level programming details).

It is here where the internet shines. You really need a network that connects to the "entire world" just to find other people who can talk to you about this subject.

Yeah. There's a right amount of delusion to have, and while it's important for every burgeoning high school student to have their dreams of being the next Bobby Fischer shot down with an absolutely middling Elo, these days, I think it's just as important for that same high school student to realize how much there is out there these days, and that there's a record for solving a rubik's cube blindfolded. And for solving it one one-handed. And for making a lego robot to solve one. Don't settle for being a middling Chess player. You can be the best one-legged Steam Deck mGBA Pokemon Blue player there ever was, if only you put just find the right flavor of Pokemon where you're the best. Just don't forget about your middling Elo score.

> No different than when a child enters high school

The problem is that when you compete against the high school, you're competing against maybe ~100? people. With internet you're "competing" against thousands and sometimes millions of people, not just the best of your neighborhood but the whole world, with all the existing inequalities.

Therefore, competition is superfluous, there is little chance for "you" to win.

Going from "not the best" as a high schooler to "not the best" as an adult is... fine? Its no major difference.

That's my point. I already accepted my middling skill level in Chess, Starcraft, Drama, Music (Trumpet/Piano), martial arts and sports. Even years of effort in these subjects puts you as simply mediocre, and the sooner you realize the amount of effort it takes to just be "fine" (let alone "good" or "the best") the better it is for your psyche.

"Winning" isn't the point of... most of these hobbies? I wasn't really aiming to be a world-record holder in the 800-meter or 1600 meter by high school, I was already just aiming at something that satisfied myself (which was a ~6:30 mile time and a 2:20 800m time). Nothing crazy good, but something that made myself proud of my own efforts.

Same same as an adult. My mile time isn't as good as when I was younger and healthier and more time to run. But other skills I got, like Tetris, 40L sprint in 1-minute, is acceptable to me. Sure, stronger players can so it in sub 20-seconds but I'm satisfied with 1-minute 40L sprint?

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And you really don't have to work very hard to find an unexplored, useful profession. In particular, programming skills are a a fractal. You can probably become a "world expert" in Cobol in less time than I spent learning Tetris 40L sprints (and certainly less time to become a Cobol expert than to get a 6:30 mile run time). Assuming of course you're proficient in the base level / bachelor's level of Comp. Sci.

There's only one subject you need to be world-class in, and that's your profession. Heck, arguably you don't even need to be world-class in your work. Plenty of money in just being a "fine" programmer.

> Going from "not the best" as a high schooler to "not the best" as an adult is... fine? Its no major difference.

No matter how hard I try to improve the way my eight year old thinks about things, he always approaches new experiences with thoughts like "maybe I'll be the first to…" or "maybe I'll invent a better…".

I've seen this in my adult peers, but the wording is a bit different even though it's just as unhealthy e.g. "perhaps I'll start the next Facebook".

The sentiment is expressed in the popular meme quote: "Born too late to explore the earth, but born too early to explore the stars".

I reckon this was common in the recent past, but with the naïveté that comes with living without pervasive mass communication, those thoughts were more likely to be motivating than deflating.

what's the result though if you are the best linocut person in the world and aren't succeeding but you see the 82000 results of people evidently succeeding with something worse than what you offer.

that must suck worse.

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